This site is intended for health professionals only


Five-year-olds ‘eat own weight in sugar’, NHS drug funds pay off hospital debts and website to ‘take control’ of death

The average child aged five is eating their own weight in sugar each year, The Telegraph reports.

The revelation comes as the Government has launched a new initiative to get parents to take more control over how much sugar their children have in their diet.

This includes a new app that parents can use to check the sugar content of foods, by scanning the bar code on the products.

In other news, health chiefs have diverted £1bn meant for new drugs into plugging gaps in NHS budgets, The Times claims.

Apparently money that industry has agreed to refund the NHS for spending on branded drugs above an £8bn cap is being used to cover hospital deficits, instead of giving the money to doctors to use the newest drugs as intended.

Critics such as Katherine Murphy, chief of the Patients Association, said the money should not be used to ‘prop up other services’.

But Professor Karl Claxton, a health economist at the University of York, said the Government ‘had got a good deal because NHS spending on items such as more staff offered better value for money than new medicines’, the paper adds.

Finally, a charity is launching a website to help people take ‘greater control over their death’, reports The Independent.

The charity, Compassion in Dying, said the website – MyDecision.org – will enable people to complete an online declaration of how they wish to be treated in the final weeks of their life, known as an ‘advance decision’.

 


          

Visit Pulse Reference for details on 140 symptoms, including easily searchable symptoms and categories, offering you a free platform to check symptoms and receive potential diagnoses during consultations.